Item: i88496

Authentic Medal of:

Great Britain (United Kingdom)
London Bridge
1831 Silver-plated White Metal Token Medal 25mm (7.54 grams)
CARRIAGE WAY 33 ½ FT. LENGTH OF BRIDGE 782 FT. CENTRE ARCH 150 ·· SIDE ARCH 140, The river Thames and London Bridge. Embankments left and right, five central arches, several boats on river in foreground. In distance St. Paul’s Cathedral and other buildings.
THE FIRST STONE OF THE NEW LONDON BRIDGE WAS LAID BY JOHN GARRATT ESQR. LORD MAYOR OF LONDON ON THE 14 OF MARCH 1824 AND OPEN’D BY THEIR MAJESTIES AUGUST 1ST. 1831, Central inscription in ten lines, the top and bottom lines curved.

Medal Notes:
This base metal token commemorates the opening of the bridge. It wrongly states that the first stone of the bridge was laid March 14, 1824 instead of June 15, 1825 which is the generally accepted date. Work on the new London Bridge, to replace the existing bridge that was over 600 years old, began in 1825. The new bridge was designed by John Rennie, completed in 1831 and formally opened by King William IV on 1 August 1831. Background: A small 19th Century medalet to commemorate the opening of New London Bridge in 1831. Later in 1967 the Common Council of the City of London placed the bridge on the market and began to look for potential buyers. On 18 April 1968, the bridge was sold to an American. It was purchased by the Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for US$2,460,000. As the bridge was taken apart, each piece was meticulously numbered. The blocks were then shipped overseas through the Panama Canal to California and trucked from Long Beach to Arizona. The bridge was reconstructed by Sundt Construction at Lake Havasu City, Arizona and re-dedicated on 10 October 1971.

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Several bridges named London Bridge have spanned the River Thames between the City of London and Southwark, in central London. The current crossing, which opened to traffic in 1973, is a box girder bridge built from concrete and steel. It replaced a 19th-century stone-arched bridge, which in turn superseded a 600-year-old stone-built medieval structure. This was preceded by a succession of timber bridges, the first of which was built by the Roman founders of London.

The current bridge stands at the western end of the Pool of London and is positioned 30 metres (98 ft) upstream from previous alignments. The approaches to the medieval bridge were marked by the church of St Magnus-the-Martyr on the northern bank and by Southwark Cathedral on the southern shore. Until Putney Bridge opened in 1729, London Bridge was the only road-crossing of the Thames downstream of Kingston upon Thames. London Bridge has been depicted in its several forms, in art, literature, and songs, including the nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down”, and the epic poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.

The modern bridge is owned and maintained by Bridge House Estates, an independent charity of medieval origin overseen by the City of London Corporation. It carries the A3 road, which is maintained by the Greater London Authority. The crossing also delineates an area along the southern bank of the River Thames, between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, that has been designated as a business improvement district.

The bridge area has twice been the target of terrorist attacks – once in 2017, and again in 2019.

The old bridge continued in use while the new bridge was being built, and was demolished after the latter opened in 1831. New approach roads had to be built, which cost three times as much as the bridge itself. The total costs, around £2.5 million (£229 million in 2019), were shared by the British Government and the Corporation of London.

Rennie’s bridge was 928 feet (283 m) long and 49 feet (15 m) wide, constructed from Haytor granite. The official opening took place on 1 August 1831; King William IV and Queen Adelaide attended a banquet in a pavilion erected on the bridge. The northern approach road, King William Street, was renamed after the monarch.

In 1896 the bridge was the busiest point in London, and one of its most congested; 8,000 pedestrians and 900 vehicles crossed every hour. It was widened by 13 feet (4.0 m), using granite corbels. Subsequent surveys showed that the bridge was sinking an inch (about 2.5 cm) every eight years, and by 1924 the east side had sunk some three to four inches (about 9 cm) lower than the west side. The bridge would have to be removed and replaced.

Great Britainn, also known as Britain, is an island in the North Atlantic off the north-west coast of continental Europe. With an area of 209,331 km² (80,823 sq mi), it is the largest island in Europe and the ninth-largest in the world. In 2011 the island had a population of about 61 million people, making it the third-most populous island in the world, after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan. The island is the largest in the British Isles archipelago, which also includes the island of Ireland to its west and over 1,000 smaller surrounding islands.

The island is dominated by an oceanic climate with quite narrow temperature differences between seasons. Politically, the island is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, constituting most of its territory: most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island, with their respective capital cities, London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff. The term Great Britain often extends to include surrounding islands that form part of England, Scotland, and Wales.

A single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the Union of Scotland and England (which already comprised the present-day countries of England and Wales) in 1707. More than a hundred years before, in 1603, King James VI, King of Scots, had inherited the throne of England, but it was not until 1707 that the Parliaments of the two countries agreed to form a unified state. In 1801, Great Britain united with the neighboring Kingdom of Ireland, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the Irish Free State seceded in 1922.